It’s official: NASA’s OSIRIS-Rex spacecraft snagged 121.6 grams of pristine house rocks when it bopped the asteroid Bennu 4 years in the past, greater than double the mission’s official science objective, the company confirmed February 15.
Launched in 2016, OSIRIS-Rex is NASA’s first mission to gather samples from an asteroid and return them to Earth so scientists can examine our photo voltaic system’s origins. After performing its grab-and-go process from the diamond-shaped Bennu, the spacecraft dropped its canister into our environment final 12 months (SN: 9/22/23). Engineers swiftly shuttled it off to a specifically designed pattern curation heart on the Johnson Area Middle in Houston, the place it was positioned in a airtight glove field to stop contamination by terrestrial materials.
Whereas researchers have been in a position to analyze some rocks and mud already, weighing the complete pattern has been delayed by a pair caught screws that prevented anybody from accessing the complete contents of the capsule (SN: 10/11/23). Some intelligent workarounds lastly unlocked the complete pattern on January 10, and it’ll now be distributed to scientists world wide for examine.
To find out how engineers acquired the canister open, in addition to what sorts of science the pattern will train us, Science Information spoke with Harold Connolly, a geologist at Rowan College in Glassboro, N.J., who oversees evaluation of the fabric from Bennu. The dialog has been edited for readability and brevity.
SN: Shortly after retrieving the OSIRIS-Rex canister, you had been in a position to accumulate some pattern, proper?
Connolly: There was a number of mud on the skin of the canister. That was the primary materials we acquired, roughly 1 to 1.1 grams or so of high-quality mud particles.
SN: What sorts of issues did you face earlier than you can totally open the principle pattern container?
Connolly: There’s a bunch of fasteners or screws holding the container closed, roughly 32 of them. And two of them we couldn’t loosen sufficient with the tools we had. However there’s a mylar flap that strikes, which trapped the pattern in a container. The curation staff on the Johnson Area Middle discovered it may simply push down the flap. With out eradicating the plate that was caught, the staff may get pattern out from contained in the TAGSAM [Touch-and-Go-Sample-Acquisition-Mechanism] head by actually pushing down the mylar flap and scooping it out very gently. We acquired 70 grams of pattern — rather a lot.
However to entry the remainder of the pattern, they needed to create a brand new sort of ratchet wrench screwdriver. The earlier screwdriver was beginning to flex somewhat bit, so that you may be breaking the screwdriver.
SN: Are you able to inform me something about what you’ve discovered from the pattern you will have up to now?
Connolly: It’s a serpentinite. It’s an altered rock the place the unique rocky materials has interacted with water, and that authentic rocky materials should have been wealthy in olivine and pyroxene and another widespread rock-forming minerals on Earth, however modified and altered in a lovely approach. That could be a geologic puzzle to determine.
SN: What have we suspected in regards to the historical past of Bennu that the pattern helps to verify?
Connolly: Oh, there’s rather a lot.
Bennu itself is in a configuration that’s not what it initially was. As soon as upon a time, the items that grew to become Bennu had been in a a lot completely different object, in all probability a heck of rather a lot larger. We’re speaking quickly after the photo voltaic system shaped, 4.5 billion years in the past.
When that object shaped, materials got here collectively, introduced ices with it — and never simply water ice, however carbon monoxide and ammonia ice — which implies it needed to accrete someplace out previous what we name the snow line, out previous Mars within the outer photo voltaic system. At that distance from the solar, temperatures are low sufficient for these ices to kind.
Finally, the inside of the bigger, authentic object began to warmth up due to radioactivity that’s naturally within the materials, and that started to soften the ice and turn out to be fluid. Fluid started to work together with the father or mother physique to kind new minerals — like serpentinite — from the fabric that accreted.
We’ll be teasing out how a lot of it was altered, how a lot is relic from the pre-accretion stage, how a lot is definitely from stars that died and injected mud into our photo voltaic system.
SN: It feels like a dynamic and complex historical past.
Connolly: We’re occupied with what occurred: How did that authentic father or mother physique change? Was it impacted by one other physique and smashed aside to create the bigger boulders that ultimately got here collectively to kind Bennu? And the way lengthy has Bennu been on this present configuration? How a lot had it skilled interplay with the solar or with cosmic rays? All these sorts of processes we will tease out by analyzing teeny tiny little bits of pattern.
SN: Do we have now any solutions to any of those questions?
Connolly: Keep tuned.
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